The GPRS or universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) is an evolution of the global system for mobile communications (GSM) standard to provide packet switched data services to GSM mobile stations. Packet-switched data services are used for transmitting chunks of data or for data transfers of an intermittent or bursty nature. Typical applications for 3GPP packet service include Internet browsing, wireless e-mail, video streaming, and credit card processing, etc. used by human users.
Organizations both private & government that are Local & Global are looking for new and innovative ways to manage their business & operations at an optimum cost structure. There are many use-cases including disaster management, lifestyle, telematic, performance management and remote monitoring where sensors with communication capability could be effectively used. However for such use cases to be mass adopted the cost of connectivity needs to drop down significantly. One place to gain significant efficiency is to access and process the connection/device related data in an optimized way.
These new applications and markets aim to take advantage of ubiquitous cellular coverage. Even though the underlying radio technology continues to evolve from 2G, 2.5G, 3G and now LTE, new innovation is being developed to take advantage of this infrastructure in the form of smart devices and sensors that are creating new market opportunities for Mobile Network Operators (MNO's). Cellular networks with predictable and mature connectivity model are ideal for connecting millions of data collecting devices to the processing infrastructure. The opportunity to connect millions and even billions of devices is creating an exciting market opportunity commonly defined as M2M.
However, as MNO's look to seize this new market opportunity, there are many challenges in using the same architecture and practices that were designed for a very different human consumer market. The cost structure is fundamentally different, the relationship with the Enterprise is fundamentally different and the impact on the network from non-human devices is fundamentally different.
Most machine to machine offerings currently in the market treat the cellular network as a transport pipe. While this approach is simple and can be deployed using existing cellular infrastructure, it ignores the fact that machine type communication needs are inherently different than those for a human subscriber. Furthermore, a lot of machine type communication is more signaling intensive than data intensive; i.e. the amount of data that is communicated between the device and the network is often times very small and there is a huge signaling overhead in sending small size data. As the number of connected devices goes up, the network would succumb to signaling overload and possible other forms of congestion.
FIG. 1 is a block diagram illustrating typical machine to machine type communications over GPRS network architecture. Referring to FIG. 1, machine type devices 102-103 are communicatively coupled to a packet core network 110, in the same way as the human user devices 101 are coupled to a packet core network 110. For example, machine type device 101 is coupled to the core network 110 via a 3G Radio access network through e.g. nodeB or NB 104 and radio network controller (RNC) 105. Machine type device 103 is coupled to the core network 110 via a corresponding long term evolution (LTE) access network (e.g., evolved UMTS terrestrial RAN (E-UTRAN) node B or eNB) 106. In order to communicate to a machine server located in other networks such as Internet 120 and/or Enterprise premise 121, machine type devices 102-103 have to go through core network 110. Typically, core network 110 includes a serving GPRS support node (SGSN) 111 for 3G network or serving gateway (S-GW) 113 for LTE network 107 and a gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) 112 for 3G network or packet data network (PDN-GW) 114 for LTE network. These SGSN 111/S-GW 113 and GGSN 112/PDN-GW 114 relay communications between a machine type UE 102-103 and a destination (e.g. Enterprise server) 120-121. A typical core network also includes a home location register (HLR) or home subscriber server (HSS) 115 storing subscription profile and a policy and charging rule function (PCRF) 116.
Based on a statistics of machine to machine communications, there will be billions of connected devices in a few years and this will result in significant increase in amount of signaling and amount of data storage needed for keeping the persistent data and dynamic context of each session. In terms of data storage, due to hierarchical architecture of network, there is a lot of duplication in the network to store these data. For example, most of information is duplicated in home location register (HLR), serving GPRS support node (SGSN), and gateway GPRS support node (GGSN). With the increase in number of connected devices, the built-in hierarchy in the existing architecture results in more investment in the core network to support the storage and duplicate of information for all those devices. This also does not take the group nature of devices into consideration. As most of these devices share the same characteristics compared to individual human users, many of the information parameters are repeated for each device, making each core network node even more inefficient.